SEO Strategy for 2014 — How Google Change my Overall SEO Strategy
Who said SEO is Dead?
John Mueller of Google, I guess everyone especially people that practice SEO knows who is. He said,
backlinks with search terms as your Anchors are potentially a massive red flag for a future site slap
I had a client that pays thousands of dollar that is on line of fire and if I were to believe John, the chance of losing that client is huge. Also this statement created seismic shift in what I know was the best SEO practice in order to rank for the search terms I am targeting.
Luckily, I keep a record of most if not all of the linkbuilding I did for my clients. Backlinks I've made specifically for this client are mostly Guest Post and Private Blog network (Watch out for my Guest Post and PBN Best Practices article due to come out in the next couple of days) these links are not that painful to remove/replace anchor text you almost have full control on these links. Backlinks that are nearly impossible to remove like blog comments, articles submission, social bookmarks, automated links etc, that was built prior to my takeover are sent for disavow. In short, did a link cleanup to avoid the coming penalty
Few days after link cleanup, minor ranking change was observed and lost a little traffic (very surprising as almost 1/3 of the overall links has been disavowed/removed) but much better than getting hit first before taking action.
At this point, my SEO strategy has changed. Keyword anchor is no longer part of my linkbuilding strategy. Those statements of John Mueller made a huge change in my SEO Strategy for my clients and also suggest a couple of things for me;
1. Search Engines now understand actual search terms and non-search terms and the obvious winners of this are sites that don’t have search terms as Anchor Text in their backlink profile. Remember that John Wiley, the lead designer for Google Search, said that 500 million of queries submitted have never been seen before by Google’s SE. That’s a lot of terms to get classified for anti-SEO algorithm changes!
2. Search Engine Optimization in 2014 onwards should be free of anchored search terms, so your anchors text profile will only be;
a. Raw URLs (http://example.com/)
b. Brand Name (Only if your domain is not EMD)
c. Domain.com (example.com, www.example.com)
d. Generic terms (Click here, more information, Read more, etc.)
e. Longtail terms, and misspelled phrases
f. Image links
On page SEO Plays a Big factor in this Change (But don’t overdo On-Page)
If you don’t have search term anchors in your backlink profile, how would Google’s Search Engine know your webpage relevance in order to get displayed to match the query?
This is where your website’s on-page seo comes into play. Use your on-page seo to signal topic relevance to increase the chance of your webpages be displayed to match user query, I believe we are now close to entering a new age in SEO where Anchor Text is no longer used (or at least not a huge factor anymore) by search engines to decide what website will be displayed to answer user’s query.
3. Traffic Coming from Longtail Keywords
My article “My linkbuilding startegy in 2014" is ranked on the first page for terms like linkbuilding 2014, linkbuilding strategy and for a bunch of related longtails, beating authority sites like moz, searchengineland and searchenginejournal just a few days after being posted generating thousands of views and referral.
If you have a couple of traffic funnels like this it can compensate lost traffic for your penalised sites and also reduce dependence on Google organic traffic. Another good thing about this is more often than not, traffic coming from a well placed, well optimized traffic funnels are highly targeted and will likely to convert.
I am currently testing using other properties for my traffic generation without Google. These properties are;
- PRweb.com — Paid Press Release
- SBwire.Com- Paid Press Release
- Youtube Video — Need optimized Title and Description to attract views and clicks
- Dailymotion.com — I am occasionally seeing videos thats ranking on the first page
- Storify.com — I have an article for a client that’s ranking on the 6th spot for a longtail but generating very little traffic.
- Soundcloud.com — haven’t tried it yet but looks interesting
- Rebelmouse.com — Seeing it ranking on the first for weight loss related terms too
- Yahoo Answer- Not sure about the quality of traffic but worth a shot
- Facebook.com- Same with yahoo answer when it comes to quality of traffic
The criteria for selection of websites to use are high domain authority, accept links and if they are already ranking on the first page for keywords that are topically relevant to websites I am trying to promote. Some of these properties can also withstand heavy spamming from my experience and hardly get penalised, which means you can throw almost any kinds of backlinks to get it on the first page in short span of time minus the fear of penalty and start generating traffic instead doing shady SEO on your main site and risk getting kick on the ass by Google.
This simple idea work best on small affiliate sites but can also be applied to newly put up small business websites trying to generate traffic without Google right away while slowly but steadily building high quality links to the main site until you achieved the targeted ranking for your keywords.
